Starting Back To School- Class Assignment

Melissa Beckwith
9/11/2014/ Vail College English 101
Autobiographical Statement

Starting Back To School

I write constantly.  I have a blog that is filled with ramblings and thoughts, and for every one that is posted, there are another twenty posts that are in draft form, waiting to be completed and/or edited, and published.  I write to clear my mind, to try to understand why things happen a certain way, and to help me process my thoughts and feelings.  Today the question is why am I going back to school?  The short answer is that I feel stuck.  The long answer has so much more to it.

I was once a bright and willful student, who thought outside the box and had an opinion all my own.  Twenty years ago, at the age of seven years old, I formed a protest against my second grade teacher's decision to cancel our class play.  The decision was announced at the beginning of the school day and by the time the big yellow buses rolled in to take us home, a petition, signed by every member of Mrs. Dicken's second grade class, was sitting on her desk.  I must have been something to watch, marching up to her desk with my piece of paper covered in signatures scribbled by little 7 and 8 year old hands, and my defiant little grin.  I am the only child in her thirty-five years of teaching second grade, to protest one of her decisions. 

At some point during my school career, that child; the bright, independent, opinionated seven year old, disappeared. I was no longer smart.  My opinions no longer mattered. My dependence was no longer on myself, but always on another.  At some point, I became never good enough, worthless unless someone else said otherwise.  This carried over into adulthood. I had dreams of going to school to work with children with disabilities, but I was told I wasn't smart enough to go to college and "what a stupid career choice that would be anyway".  I believed what I was told and after high school I started working in customer service.  I was usually an over achiever at work.  I was driven and even had my own business and owned my own farm, teaching horseback riding lessons to over twenty students by the time I was twenty-one.  Still, as the young wife of my former high school sweetheart, an alcohol and drug addict, nothing I did was ever good enough. I was stupid and lazy and worthless.

After my marriage ended, I ended up with another man who made me believe I was capable of anything, as long as "anything" was his idea.  He supported me in going for my placement test with URock in 2010, shortly after the birth of our daughter, Audrianna.  He supported the idea of me going back to school only until he found out that I had no interest in going into nursing.  Once he knew I was not going to become a nurse, I was not smart enough to go to college.  He decided that I should work from home so that I would be there for our daughter and his other daughter and moved me an hour and a half from everything I knew.  He traded my car in towards his new truck and he handled all the money.  The house was never clean enough. Supper was always burned or made with too many calories.  I was always saying something stupid. He always told me that I would be nothing without him.  Then one day he found someone he believed was better, someone that was going to school to be a nurse.  My then 2 year old daughter and I had seven days to move with no vehicle, a zoo of animals, no steady cash flow, and $6 to our names.

Two years later, I am a single mother, working full time.  I have a well paying customer service position, where the benefits are better than anything offered by any other local employer.  I am a top performer earning incentive for my excellent performance and I am completely unsatisfied with my job.  My job means nothing to anyone after whatever problem has arisen is solved.  I don't know what I want to do, but this isn't it. I feel stuck.

I started back to school today, nine years after graduating high school.  As I dropped her off at daycare, my bright, independent, opinionated four year old daughter hugged me and said "Good luck at school Mommy".  She was more excited to tell her friends that I was going to school than she has ever been about me going to work.  As I drove the twenty minutes from her daycare to school, I considered turning around, but then I thought how disappointed Audrianna would be if I didn't go.  As I entered the building, I considered heading back to my truck. My chest felt tight, I almost couldn't breath.  It would be so easy to turn the books back in for someone more worthy to use and just stick to my forty hours of customer service for the rest of my working life.  For a minute in the elevator, anxiety almost won and let me leave without heading to class.  Then a message came through on Facebook, "I'm proud of you, Love Mrs. Dickens".  Twenty years later, Mrs. Dickens still keeps my protest taped to the inside of her school cabinets in her classroom, beside a poster I created of a laughing ape with her name on it.  While I don't always remember that bright, independent, opinionated seven year old girl, there are a few people that do and they have their ways to remind me.  Why am I starting back to school?  I'm starting because I am not stupid, I am good enough, and somewhere here, there is a intelligent, independent, and opinioned woman; where better to have her make her reappearance then in college.